Washington's do-si-do

February 4, 1982

We must have been away at a husking bee last fall when the Senate voted to designate the square dance as America's national folk dance. Now the turkey in the straw is coming home to roost as we try to catch up with the progress of the resolution in the House of Representatives. Fortunately no one there is rushing to promenade all, so maybe cooler heads will prevail than the redoubtable fiddler, Robert Byrd, who sponsored the square dance putsch in the Senate.

If the United States must be tied down to an official national dance, which we doubt, does it have be one derived from Europe like the square dance? The tap dance somehow seems equally or more American, though it, too, has roots abroad. It's only the jitterbug that the encyclopedia uneqivocally states was originated in America and spread around the world.

Anyone for the jitterbug as the national folk dance? No? Well, maybe the US is simply too terpsichoreanly diverse to settle on any one dance as its own. And maybe Congress ought to sit this one out.